March Equinox. We cross the celestial equator, and spring begins again. As we pass through the constellations, we are given a day of equal light and dark. It’s one of only two brief moments in our year where the hemispheres stand in perfect balance. From here on, the days progress—the north moves closer to the sun, while the south retreats into darkness. This is the steady rhythm of our cosmic tide. We will return to this moment in time.
This rhythm has been on my mind of late—not just in the astronomical cycles that shape our years, but in how the modern world seems to have lost sync with them. I started writing these reflections in 2020. These were our pandemic years. The period when nearly everyone was confined to their homes. The world—which had moved so fast—simply stopped, and for the briefest of moments, it felt as though we might be witnessing a great reset. We saw memes declaring that “nature was healing” and people found new priorities within their lives. They took walks, opened themselves to the seasons, and found deeper meaning in the simpler things.
Five years on, that optimism now feels like a distant memory. The world moved fast before 2020, but now it feels more relentless—faster and more unstable than ever. You’ve felt it too. We all have. In some ways, the reasons feel self-evident: geopolitical tensions, war, climate collapse, economic uncertainty, political polarization, a growing distrust in institutions — the list goes on. We’ve always had challenges, but why does today’s instability feel so pronounced? Why is this feeling of imbalance a condition that feels unique to our time?
Of course, some could argue that, in many ways, our daily lives are actually more stable than ever before. At first, it may seem contradictory to suggest that our unease stems from the fact that—in many respects—things have never been better. While this may seem unfair—given the relentless stream of bad news—there may be some paradoxical truth to it.
Recently, political scientist Brian Klaas articulated this imbalance, outlining why, despite everything, it feels like the world is falling apart: “Modern humans experience a different world and a different dynamic of our existence than anyone who has ever come before us” he states. He explains that, throughout history, people lived with “local instability but global stability.” Daily life for hunter-gatherers, for instance, was unpredictable and chaotic, yet the broader world moved slowly, offering a sense of continuity.
Klaas argues that we have now flipped that world. “We experience local stability, but global instability.” Our daily routines in the West are defined by remarkable consistency: we can order products online and know exactly when they’ll arrive, or visit a chain coffee shop anywhere in the world and expect to get the same taste. Yet the global landscape is far more volatile than before. Klaas warns that “when things do go wrong, the ripple effects are much more profound and much more immediate.” We’ve built a world where the mundane feels stable and unchanging, yet beneath the surface, “democracies are collapsing, and rivers are drying up.”
While Klaas highlights the dangers of global instability, it’s worth also considering that the local stability that we have created is equally damaging in its own distinctive way. The mundanity of our daily routines exist in an artificial world that prioritises hyper-convenience over everything else. While we should be concerned when we walk into a supermarket and find the same fruits and vegetables for sale all year round, we aren’t. Strawberries in February may be a small luxury, but they symbolize our growing detachment from natural cycles. While, in the day-to-day, this seems relatively small, the disconnect manifests itself in other less pleasing ways–even without our awareness. We’ve become so reliant on consistency that, when modern life demands it of us, we tend to accept it as the norm. Without the rhythms of the natural world to guide us, we simply accept this hyper-consistency as the default rhythm of our lives.
While our ancestors faced unpredictability and chaos in their day-to-day, they were far more in tune with the rhythms of the seasons. While they worked hard in preparation for the solstice, they then allowed themselves time to rest. They listened to their instincts and recovered their strength in the winter. When the equinox arrived it was time for celebration. There is a necessary restorative purpose to these rhythms. Today, our bodies demand rest but we’re conditioned into hyper-consistency. Programmed to always be productive.
Another byproduct of this hyper-consistency is that it breeds monotony. When you can get everything, everywhere, all at once, the culture becomes obsessed with finding the new. When everything is readily available, nothing feels special. We are pushed to constantly seek newness elsewhere. Our modern age is fixated with constant novelty. In the context of our culture, this feels like a worrying development; a speeding up where there is an implied necessity to always be chasing the next new thing.
Writer Sally Rooney highlighted this recently in a conversation with David Marchese: “I think that there is a huge cultural fixation with novelty and growth” she says. “Our whole economic system is obviously built on constant, permanent, ceaseless growth. We all have to grow. Everything has to grow all the time. Get bigger, sell more, and be different.” She views this as the principle of our present culture and doesn’t find it very interesting. When we strive for novelty we miss out on the depth and richness that can often emerge through sustained engagement. The pressure to constantly seek the next new thing erodes our ability to appreciate what is already present.
We have become overstimulated—always absorbing, always chasing the next novelty. And the problem is that we’re not getting any smarter for it. Indeed, recent research suggests that intelligence levels are declining. This is across all age levels. We are struggling with concentration issues and it is impacting our ability to learn new things. We’ve never had so much information and yet the way we absorb it–the way we consume it–has shrunk our attention spans significantly. It is this weight of everything, everywhere, all at once that has stopped us from thinking and has trapped us in a state of passive consumption, leaving us unable to process or engage with information in any meaningful way. When the Oxford Word of the Year is 'brain rot' it's stark reflection of the times we live in.
Critic Leon Wieseltier captured our modern predicament in a conversation with historian Drew Faust: “I think we’re accelerating ourselves beyond what our hearts and our minds can actually absorb.” He goes on to describe this as living a checklist life—“we’re all just getting everything done.”
AAlthough their discussion took place nearly a decade ago, his insights resonate even more profoundly today. Yet amidst this imbalance, Wieseltier sees possibilities for resistance—what he calls 'bastions against acceleration'. One such bastion is reading—“real reading” that slows you down, allowing ideas to unfurl and giving you room to roam. He also points to sex, noting its resistance to being rushed: “You can’t fast-forward it,” he jokes. Similarly, music offers its own corrective; as he explains, “You can walk out of a Bruckner symphony, but you cannot speed it up. You are at the mercy of whatever the tempo of a piece of music is, which is why it is one of the most honest-making and one of the great spiritual correctives of what we’re living in.” Ultimately, this acceleration, this imbalance of impulse is stripping us of connection. “If you speed things up, what you’re really doing is diminishing or impoverishing or in some way even abolishing experience. Because experience takes place in time.”
And so, this equinox, as we cross the celestial equator and our planet grants us a fleeting moment of perfect balance, perhaps it's worth keeping these natural rhythms in mind. We should recognise the light and dark, the motion and stillness. As the world urges us to move faster, lets embrace the natural cycles that sustain us—slow down. Read deeply. Lose yourself in music. Give yourself over to experiences that demand presence. Remember, we will return to this moment in time—and what remains is how we choose to meet it.